589 Coaching 14 Accounting Firms in 59 Minutes! [AI, Pricing, Hiring, Marketing and More]

Just a few months back, I was hosting events for accounting firm folk around the country, the United States of countries, and we had back-to-back events in San Francisco and Los Angeles. And buddy, they were bangers. They were really good. We got into AI, tech selection, pricing, all sorts of really good stuff. And so we put together this supercut of the end of the night Q&A when everybody's already got a drink in their hand and they're lobbing the doozies up. It's a supercut of the best questions from both of those events. These are like real firm owners all hanging in a room together, just, you know, vibing. Anyways, put this together because I thought it'd be a fun watch. A lot of really sharp ideas shared here. It was a really good discussion. So without further ado, enjoy these clips from our San Francisco and Los Angeles events. What do you guys want to dig into? I sure got a ton of questions coming out of the proposal stuff, like practically how do we implement this? What would be the best place to jump off on? Hey Jason, so I have a question about marketing. Other than existing client referrals, what do you recommend for paid marketing or other marketing channels that you think have the highest ROI or like time investment per return? Yeah, good question. My take on marketing is that Everyone needs to be marketing to a degree because if I just sit back and wait for whatever the universe sends my way, that's not usually the optimized business to run. It is a business to run and you can actually fill up a client list super fast that way. But if we go back to the bronze, silver, gold exercise, say you run this test with 100 clients and we get, you know, 18 silvers and 3 golds or something like that. That's great. Like that is a much more profitable business now even though those aren't huge numbers. But wouldn't it be nice if my whole client list was Silvers? When we first do that and we learn who are the people that will opt into the more premium tiers, that gives us a really valuable signal to then go out and speak to the people who will say yes to that. I would say the bigger problem for most of us is not are we showing up on the right platforms, it's that we don't actually yet understand enough why people are saying yes to premium prices and the language that they use around like why they need us. So I had clients that like super didn't value us. They would complain about the bill every time because we weren't solving meaningful pains. I had clients who pay me 10 times as much that would send us giant gift baskets every single year and they loved us. Those are the people where we gotta understand where they're at and that's how we build a marketing plan around it. So that's a prerequisite to doing marketing that works. Unfortunately, what most people do is they'll like pull in an agency or pour money into paid ad spend and that kind of just goes nowhere 'cause we haven't nailed that yet. Or worst case, it brings in stuff you don't even want. Like generic leads, right, that aren't going to pay that well. Once you've figured that out and you've kind of gone through that exercise, I would say it depends a bit on if you want to stay solo or if you're looking for something that scales with the team. If you want to stay solo, I would stick with the form of marketing that you enjoy. This kind of gets a little bit into what John is talking about. Like, my journey was I learned during COVID that I liked making videos, and I was 32, 33 at that point. I was not a theater guy. I was not a media guy. I'd never done any of that stuff. What I was was super frustrated with my firm, which was big and takes a long time to change. And I was like antsy and I'm like, I need some sort of creative outlet, like something I can get excited about. Come to find out, I really enjoyed making videos, so it came easier to me than it did for other people. So I spent the next 18 months while running a 40-person firm making 2 videos a week for 18 months. At the end of that, I had 500 subscribers. So why on God's green earth would anybody do that, right? It was because it came easier to me. And that is marketing. Like, that was great marketing. And my advantage ultimately was that I could do that thing for longer than other people could because I enjoyed it.. And we often think that the world is smaller than it is. And you're like, okay, I got to be on this platform, this platform, this platform. The honest truth here is any of us can crush in one channel. I mean, we really can. Like, there's so many people out there that we can help. And if you can marry this channel with the thing that you enjoy, that's the advantage. Like, if I enjoy having conversations about, I don't know, running or wine or whatever it is, and I just love talking with experts, cool, like do an interview podcast. Like create the first interview podcast for that specific of a person. And we talk about finance or tax or even something totally unrelated. You can do that in your sleep because you love doing that. And to me, I kind of think that this is the secret to adulting is like so much about being prolific about anything is just putting in more repetitions than anybody else. Like, I've, I think I've made more videos and done more podcasts in the accounting space than anybody in the last couple of years. And then people come and watch their first video of mine and they're like, man, you're a natural. I'm like, dude, you were not watching when it was all really bad. But like when we're a kid and there's the kid that's faster than you and then this, the natural talent and all that, it's like, oh, they're born with that. And somehow that carries on into adulthood when like beyond like 25, what really matters is like, have I done this stuff more than other people? Like it's much less sexy. Have you put in the repetitions? So in marketing that can look like, do I enjoy writing? Like great, like a blog, like LinkedIn, that sort of thing. Do I enjoy, you know, video media? Maybe that's YouTube. Do I enjoy talking with folks? Maybe that's a podcast. I think there's a form of media for any interest you may have, even if that's not showing up visually, because that's even an uncomfortable thing for us, although a very powerful thing if you can get over that. If you're trying to like build this marketing machine yourself, I try to marry something that you love with something that will find you work. If you're doing it in a team, that's kind of a different equation. Then it gets a little bit more down to what are the easiest places to find folks right now? And I would say that is, you know, as far as social media platforms go, LinkedIn is I think head and shoulders ahead of anything else right now. The tricky thing is whose voice will that ultimately be? Will that be my voice? Will that be somebody else's voice? People don't want to hear from brands. Even the LinkedIn algorithm like heavily punishes company accounts. Like you really can't get stuff to perform well posting from a company account because people just want to hear from other people, right? It's not to say that you can't get help and there aren't ways to push content from your own personal channel that may not be 100% built and written by you. But if you're taking the team approach, I do think the advice then becomes a little more traditional. Traditional, like, what does it look like to build a marketing department and all that. But I think the cooler version for like smaller firms, which is most of the people here, is like, what's the thing that I just enjoy? Like, let's make that our marketing. That's a great question. First of all, I'm a Realized member and it's phenomenal, so thank you. Oh my gosh, bless your heart. You changed our firm. We're not just doubling our revenue, you really made such a difference for us, so thank you. And I have 100 more questions, but you ask me— you ask yours first. My question is For firms that are building client-facing AI GPTs, what's your recommended roadmap? Oh, I love that question. Yeah. What are you thinking of in terms of like where would you use it more for marketing, like on a landing page or something like that? Yeah, we do a lot of tax planning. That's where our firm is moving. And so we wanted to build something that would be— I want my receptionist to be able to pull up something that, oh, it's your anniversary today. Oh, Mr. Roberts, "It's your birthday, happy birthday," right? Something that A, customer service is really top-notch. And then B, we're still compliant, right? We're not endangering the client's data. And at the same time, there's a way for the client to talk to someone when we're not there. So it really, there's a lot of parts to it. Yeah, yeah, those are a bunch of different use cases. Let's start with the internal use cases. Step number 1 is we need to be capturing our meetings. Like every day we're not capturing our meetings is a missed opportunity. Advisory calls, they're like the sawdust of a professional services firm. They are what differentiate you from every other firm is the advice that you give. So it's so important to be capturing these things. Really cool use case is supporting admins. I would also say supporting juniors. If we think about our journey into this profession, the long summer afternoons where you are just spinning your wheels, right? Love that accounting phrase, spinning your wheels, and you're stuck between the Why did you spend so much time spinning your wheels? And why are you asking me your 6th question in 20 minutes? And there's no good answer there. Man, I think the track to being more productive as a junior in this profession is going to be so much faster if we can just give our junior team access to— has anybody else in the firm ever had this conversation before? Almost certainly. Like, here's all the transcripts. Do we have good training documentation so they can ask the AI assistants, like, what do I do when I'm stuck on this? Like, yeah, like we've got that. Easiest way to build that internal stuff right now, I would say, is still custom GPTs and ChatGPT. There is still a problem of like, what's the right app for this? And the app for accountants and all that. This is getting better. I do think on the meeting transcript side, I think some of these solutions will actually come from meeting transcript providers for accounting firms. And so the two main ones right now are Vynyl and Ping. So there are meeting assistant tools that were built specifically for accounting firms that come with integrations into practice management systems. So they will push the transcript into your practice management system rather than them just collecting dust on the shelf. Step 1 is capturing the transcripts, but step 2 to 100 is how are we using them? What are we doing with them? Like, that's really exciting. So I'd say the place to start is transcripts. But I think we also need to be thinking about what are we harvesting from those transcripts. So a while back, I'd given away kind of like my 30 favorite AI prompts for meeting transcripts. And a few of my favorites there were like, strip from this transcript Any kind of things my clients said that could be used as a testimonial because we suck at asking about that, right? What if that just happened after every call? It's like, hey, your client just said this thing. Should we kick off this workflow to ask them if we could use that as a testimonial right now? Unfortunately, the process is we get the meeting transcript and goes on a shelf and somebody has to do something with it. These transcript tools for accounting firms, the exciting thing is kind of the next steps is creating these automated workflows so they just happen and they push a work item into your practice management system and assign it to somebody, right? So I'm very excited to see where those go because everything that you're describing right now unfortunately is still pretty manual. External use cases, client-facing. Anybody know Michael King? He's on LinkedIn. He's like a virtual CFO firm kind of coach. Michael King's really good stuff. He is like me but for virtual CFO shops. So if you're trying to do advisory at all, check him out. His most prominent link on LinkedIn right now hands off to an AI that is like all of his content. And I think that's a really interesting first place to send people. Would you rather send them to that or would you rather send them to your website? I don't know. Like, I could kind of go either way. And the tools for doing this are getting better. Now, to be super clear, the information that goes into an assistant like this, it is obviously not client information. It is kind of your thought leadership and all of that. Which can be extracted from client calls and probably should be. That's the starting point, kind of your frameworks and how you advise. The tool that we've used with my podcast that I still think is the best tool for this called Delphi, D-E-L-P-H-I.ai. Really cool things that they're building into this now. It will have conversations. In fact, if you got my newsletter today, the one cool thing at the end of my newsletter is my Delphi. Really cool thing that they're building into this is it will have conversations and if you want, it can point to source material. So in my case, it points to podcasts and it says, Jason said this thing in this podcast and and that's how I got to this response. If you want, you can hide that. In this use case, maybe you hide that. Like you're giving it the knowledge, maybe you don't want them to have direct access to the knowledge. But it will also plug things. So it will, it can take a conversation and it can be like, it sounds like you have this problem. Like here is this service that we have that is an entry point for people with your problem. And then it hands them off to your website. This almost feels like right now the better approach than sending people straight to your website. If you have this dialed in and you have the context and all that, right? That's really interesting to me. You can set up alerts so that any time a conversation goes into a certain kind of vicinity, they will alert you. You'll get an email and you can reach out to them directly or something like that. And in most cases, they have to provide their email to get access to it. Say the conversation is getting into, you know, cost seg conversation or something like that. And you're like, oh, that's a great way for us to start working with real estate clients to do cost seg. You set up that alert and you get that alert through your email and you probably reach out to that person directly and like, hey, do you want, do you want to chat? Like, FYI, here's what we do. I think there's a really, really juicy external version. The reason it's hard for us right now is we haven't put in the work codifying our expertise and what we know and what we're willing to tell people. I think that's actually the biggest blocker right now is the organization of the context that sits behind that AI assistant. That's both the issue for external use cases and internal use cases because we can get behind the idea of like juniors having these AI assistants that make them more productive and all that. But for our own internal, like how we use our software and our systems and all of that, most of us haven't actually documented that to the level to actually make that assistant useful and specific to us, unfortunately. So it requires going through that exercise. And every time you bring in a new person, you're like, hey, can you give us some feedback on how this was? You know, this may actually be another use case for Delphi, because if you used Delphi for the same thing, it can alert you when someone asks a question it can't answer. And so you have this feedback loop of somebody was asking about this, we can build it out a little further here if we, if that's a question we wanted to answer. That's actually a great argument for using Delphi internally. Thank you for the question. Thank you for the plug too. Can we talk about a very real problem with most offshore staffing solutions? I actually faced this one myself. Is the staffing groups that serve as sort of like a middleman, a middle person between you and your staff. Like you pay the middleman and then they pay part of that to the staff person. Did you know in most setups there's actually no way to get that staff person out of that agreement? If you're like, I'm actually tired of paying half the monthly cost to the middleman, like half the money I'm paying is going to this company, not going to the person. Can I just work with that person directly? Most of those contracts, there's actually no way to get that person out of that employment agreement. That is why this episode's sponsor TeamUp exists. They're an offshore staffing solution where you just, you work directly with that person. TeamUp, they're basically just going to serve as the recruiter. And then after that, there's no ongoing fees. Half of the money's not going to somebody else. You're just working directly with a talented human being in the Philippines. The progression, honestly, for most accounting firms is they'll hire, you know, 3 to 5 folks offshore, have good luck, and they're like, okay, what does it look like to go to 10 or 20? And they're like, I don't want half the money I'm paying to go to this other group anymore. I just want to pay these people directly, that's what TeamUp will help you do. Find you somebody great for a one-time flat recruiting fee. Actually founded by a former bookkeeping owner too. If that's something you want to explore, learn more about TeamUp down in the link in the show notes. You doing tax work right now? You got a lot of 1040s you're trying to get out the door, buddy. Have I got the app for you. It is this episode sponsor, Soraban. If you do 150 or more 1040s a year, you need an AI 1040 intake automation solution. Vastly better than Cognito Forms or the Paper Organizer or anything that a practice management system has on offer right now. With Sorban, you just dump all the docs that your clients are giving you into Sorban. It goes through a checklist of all the things that you should have for that 1040 based on pro forma data, automatically checks off all the items that are in those documents and gives you like an intelligent portal that you can feel good about putting in front of your clients that will save you a tremendous amount of time organizing all the information that you're getting in and figuring out what you have and what you still need and following up with clients, automates all of that stuff. A tremendous tax season time savings. We are in the thick of it and this is where Sorban's gonna save you a tremendous amount of time. I know tens, if not 100+ firms now that are very, very happy users. To learn more about Sorban, check out the link down in the show notes. So just as a firm owner and rolling out AI, but trying to get everybody on board, cuz as a firm owner, You know, we're trying to do it, but it's responsibly. But where do you kind of get the most bang for your buck to try to get everybody? We're using ChatGPT Teams and encouraging people to use it, but where do you put those guardrails and where do you focus on? Because there's— it's changing so quickly and it's focused. How do you focus on what to do? I think there kind of being two different types of AI. There's product AI. Blue Jays, a great example. Blue Jays has kind of built-in product AI that's just kind of a fundamentally better version of doing what we've always done, tax research, right? And then there is AI assistants, and AI assistants are like the Swiss Army knife for everything. I honestly feel like we have kind of a moral obligation to bring our teams along on this because if we haven't shown them any of this stuff and then they're out on the job market 3 years from now, good luck finding a job 3 years if you don't know how to use AI. Honestly, I mean, the answer here is like start if you haven't yet. That is the biggest thing and that's where most people are stumbling. I was talking with the CFO of of a very big, like, everybody in the room would know the company. And I was at this dinner and we chatted a bit and he's like, can you come in and like help my finance team, like show us how to get up to speed on AI? And I'm like, what AI tools do they have access to right now? And he's like, well, they don't have any. And I'm like, well, well, call me when you start. Don't call me, but just start, start letting them use something. So step 1 is to start. Step 2 is to make the conversation part of a routine. So my take here is you have to be meeting with your team every single week, at least 30 minutes, just to talk about what'd you try this week, what worked, what didn't work. And unless that standing meeting is there, the folks who are into it, sure, they'll run with it. They'll use AI. They'll be excited about it. The problem is all the folks it doesn't come naturally to. For them to just kind of rub shoulders with those folks, especially working in a distributed environment where this stuff doesn't happen naturally, for them to just see what other people are doing, I think that's super, super valuable and just kind of continuing to communicate to them like this is a really important part of knowledge work now. This is like the 40 words per minute. This is like the proficient with Microsoft Excel. Like this is just a core part of work now. Sometimes if you've got somebody that's super into this stuff and really wants to go deeper, like Chad Davis has a community that's kind of like a bunch of AI champions from a bunch of different firms. It's called Automation Town. That's a super cool group. I really hazard firms against making an AI team, an AI squad. Cuz as soon as you do, everybody's like, oh good, they'll figure it out, when we all need to be working on it, right? So get access, define the boundaries, talk about it every single week. And, and, you know, starting I think is where most people are stuck. This is kind of dipping the toes into the price increases. So we, we've been exploring kind of significantly increasing prices on some of our much lower paying clients. Like, how do you kind of go about that initial bump into where you're at like an adequate price level with like a large amount of people and like not scare everyone away? And do you, do you at the same time like do the 3-tier proposal or do you just try and get them to like a reasonable level and then build off of that? So I can tell you what I did in my firm, which was an 80-year firm that had every friend of every partner that firm had ever had on the client list still. We were doing 1040s as cheap as $150. We had 85% of the headcount of the firm accounted for less than 20% of the revenue. So we had a long tail, buddy. It was a lot of cheap projects. Our process was our new minimum was going to be— I can't remember what it was, like $800 or something like that. And we had folks way less than that. So we're talking about increasing price on them 2, 3x. You said something there. You said, how do I do it without— I can't remember what it was— without scaring them all away, without scaring them all away. You know the answer to that. You're going to scare them away. You got to spreadsheet this out. That was how we got there. So it doesn't mean that we're going to pull these people all the way to $800 in year 1. Like maybe there's a 2-stepper there, but like I'm like, don't give away the farm by any means. Spreadsheet this one out. In a firm like that, there is no world where you go backwards. I'm convinced of that. You gotta be so bad at this stuff to find a way to go backwards. These projects, you're not making money on them already in all likelihood, but pulling those up, the amount of folks who will still say yes, which people are always surprised by, comes back to what we've been talking about all day, the fact that they already value you more than you're paying. It's like, there's a number one thing I hear when people do the big scary, like multiple times price increase, Nobody left. It's kind of surprising. We only lost a couple of people. It's because they value you more than your pricing. And it's us that's scared. Spreadsheet that out and you will have total confidence that like there's no risk to the business here. Really, there's risk to our personal relationships and reputation. And that's what you got to focus on is what's the compassionate way to communicate this. What we did, we wrote the old letter. It's like a 2-page letter. Don't make it into a sob story. Don't make them feel bad for you. What we were saying was The reality is we are trying to serve a more specific type of person to be even better for that more specific type of person. And the reality is that's going to look like cutting about half of our client list. If you're receiving this letter, we want to move forward with you. You're going to receive a proposal with the price for us working with you next year. And we had some people drop, very small number. We had some people drop. But what we heard more than anything else was, oh, we're so relieved that we're on the list. Thank you so much. For tripling our price. So we hear a lot of that. The thing we oftentimes don't factor in is what if we don't do this? Like, I mean, that's just a timeline that doesn't work. There's a million reasons why we got sucked into charging that price. We just kind of got to change the expectation and rip that Band-Aid off. Sometimes we're actually too nice here and we can even communicate the change, be like, we don't want to increase more than $100 on you. And you just set yourself up for another 7 years of suffering because this year's $800 minimum is going to be next year's $1,000 minimum. Like, Rip that bandaid off. If anything, we're doing them a disservice thinking that they're going to keep living on the lam for another 5 years. Honestly, something that really helps— who else is dealing with that right now? Who else has got a version of that? Shut up. You don't. Okay. Yeah, it was nothing. And then like, yep, a bunch of people. Honestly, this is a— this is— it's between the ears. It really is. If you can meet some of these folks that are struggling with the same thing, Big plaid brown shirt. Track him down after this. If you can meet some other folks that are going through the same thing, it makes a world of difference. It really does. Because you're worried about getting crap from all these people and you're like, man, that's going to hurt. Having a support group, especially folks trying to do the same thing, it means it really helps. How do you handle clients that already text you that are getting gold and silver package services but are paying bronze prices? Yeah, the old paying bronze for the gold level service. I think this can go two different ways. On the one hand, you are well within your rights to claw that back, to pull that back. And sometimes you just have to do that. There's no way around it. Part of the problem is we don't always talk about what we do through the lens of like, hey, this is a one-year contract we're talking about. This is what we're agreeing to for the next year. Here's what my business is willing to do, and here's where your business is and what makes sense for you. And if we talk about what we do in kind of this perpetual, it will always be that way sort of way, then it makes it harder to change the expectation with each annual renewal. The hard answer is like, Oftentimes it is, it is simply saying, here's what it's going to cost to continue to have the access that you had before. But also here are some other options that may be closer to what you've paid in the past. I met a lady in Seattle who was like, our firm is growing so fast, we're doing so well, but my team is just constantly putting meetings on my calendar all day long. And I go into the week and it's just meeting after meeting after meeting after meeting because the clients just want to talk with me about this thing. So you've kind of built this machine that is just so reliant upon you, right? She's like, how do I get out from under this? I feel so bad telling my clients that I got to change something. And I'm like, if this were your client telling you this— and she's coming to me for advice— if this were your client telling you this, what would you tell them? What would your reaction be? Like, you would celebrate them. You'd be like, man, that's awesome. Like, you are in demand. That's super cool. The day you opened your door and started doing accounting and you were hustling for anything, that level of availability and willingness to do anything, that was never going to be a forever thing. In fact, whatever you change it to right now, 12 months from now, that's going to look different. Like, that's just an ongoing process. That's your evolution. That's your growth. So the right client will be like, no, that's pretty cool. But like, I appreciate working with you and I can see why you're in demand. And they are not necessarily going to hold that against you. Because if I'm playing coach for somebody in the other situation, I'm like, yeah, no, raise your rates, work with fewer people. That's the obvious answer. Other entrepreneurs, I think, can understand that. So that's the version where you're clawing some of that stuff back. The other consideration here, and I was talking with a CFO guy in Seattle about this. I love that we were just having so many of these conversations the last couple weeks. CFO guy in Seattle, he's like, man, we do like as VIP as VIP can be. Like we can't go any more gold. And so we start talking about what he does and like he is very available and they can call him and all that stuff. But my belief is there's actually always a golder gold. To be had if you want, because there's actually accountants that will like only work with companies they take equity in. Like, that's the extreme. Like, you are on board as on board can be. And so I start talking with this guy and I'm like, what are some more premium things we could do? Like, what would it look like to a couple of times a year host maybe an onsite with like 5 or 6 clients? It's like 2 days and you do kind of this intensive thing like he does VCSFO stuff. Like, what if we actually have people out and we do a very hands-on sort of thing. We just started riffing on all these things he's never considered that he could do that is a golder gold than he has right now. And I asked him, I was like, does that actually— does that excite you? And he's like, that sounds— I would way rather do that than respond to more text messages and phone calls. Like, I actually love the idea of still going deeper. So I would say it's a combination of two things. You can always claw it back. And the people that are going to complain and all of that, those aren't people that are rooting for you. Like, the folks that are like, I can't get what I got at the same price, it's like, no, like, I don't know that those are the folks that I would even feel good about supporting, because if I'm wearing the coaching hat, I'd be very happy for their success. So you can pull it back. But at the other end of the spectrum, there's also always a more premium path you can go to. But right now it probably just feels out of reach because we're doing so much work because we can't do any more, right? Hey, real quick, some very cool new updates were just shipped by one of the leading practice management systems in my app recommendations, this episode's sponsor, Financial Cents. So if you do bookkeeping work or client accounting work, this is worth checking out. They're building some month-end close automation features into the practice management system. So stuff like handling uncategorized transactions, flagging transactions without payees, without class, without location, expenses and bills without attachments, inconsistent expense classification, large transactions— it will now flag all of these items inside of a month-end close in Financial Sense because it's syncing the actual ledger data from QuickBooks Online to auto-flag these items. Really cool. Some stuff that you've only seen to date really in like dedicated workflow tools. Financial Sense now, which is a practice management system, is pulling some of the best of that workflow into the platform so you can do it all in one place. Pretty cool stuff. And I got a discount code for you. If you sign up for their Team or Scale annual plans with 2 or more users, you can use code JASON10 to get 10% off. That is Financial Sense. Doing some cool bookkeeping automation stuff. To learn more about them, check out the link down in the show notes. It's that time of year, it really is, when your tax hosting provider absolutely grinds to a halt because everybody's in there hammering on the tax software at the same time, and the hosting servers are like, I need a break right now. There's— gang, there's a better approach. That approach is today's sponsor, Barido, who will give you your own private cloud. You don't want to share a cloud with whatever other weirdos or posting their software in your cloud with you right now. I don't know what that guy's doing. You want your own cloud that never slows down. And would you believe me if I told you it is cheaper than you would believe to move to Verado from, say, your Thomson Reuters hosting, Drake hosting, something like that? It is both cheaper. It is faster. What? That's two things. Kind of a no-brainer. They can move you over a weekend and they can even handle all of your, like, outsourced IT support, like function as your IT department. In fact, the cost to have Verado be your IT department and do all of your hosting is less than the cost of just Thomson Reuters Virtual Office. Buddy, this one is a no-brainer. On the list of to-dos to knock out right after April 15th, buddy, you're gonna wanna talk to Verado. To learn more, check out the link down in the show notes. Hi, Jason. Okay, so one of the things I found with the 3-3 proposal is how do you compartmentalize and deliver different levels of service without making a client feel nickel and dimed? Like, how do you do that? It's a lot easier to do it with scope than it is to do delivery. Any advice for that? Interesting you say that. You're talking about like how you deliver different types of delivery, I guess, or different levels of delivery without making them feel nickel and dimed. Yeah. Or different levels of delivering stuff to like your gold tier clients while saying like for your silver tier clients, you know, you tell them, oh, why'd you get back to me after 72 hours? Well, you didn't pay for a faster response time. Yeah, that to a degree. But it's for sure like this cringe thing, right? And so we're afraid of like the human interaction of like you're on a call with somebody and they say something and you're like, well, I'm sorry, this goes into the CFO level of the conversation. You do this like this weird verbal paywall thing, because, you know, we all experience that in our life. Yeah, I would say there's so much in the execution of this. So for example, I gave away my phone number on social media, and the plan was never for me to sit there all day long like responding to texts and handling all of that myself with people. The plan for that is like we have a system for how we triage that stuff, and 60% of the questions are kind of the same things, and my team can help me with those responses and all that. So like, what does text access to you actually look like? Hopefully it's not just coming to you. It is like that's something I can actually get help with from a VA, from another team member, something like that. I would say the answer to your question to a degree is channel-specific. So on a whole, yes, we have to like have the confidence to protect our own boundaries. Otherwise, what is the point? But when it comes to managing like SLAs, like response times for email, some email platforms make that really hard, like where they just don't give you a way to do that. Other platforms give you a more automated way to see like, hey, we're coming up on that deadline. We need to respond within this timeframe. On the texting side, I would say, Similarly, like, this really boils down to a lot of us need, I guess, just a more sophisticated platform to manage this across a team rather than just like literally SMSing people. When the client's pushing back and if they're saying like, what took you so long to get back to me? This is where having some resources that just explain our different levels of service is really helpful. If they're like, why did it take you 3 days to get back to me? It's just like, hey, just to remind you, we've got you kind of with this level of package and like a supporting graphic or a PDF or something like this. This is a point of reference, like, just remind you, this is what we got you on, but I'd be happy to bump you to this next thing if you are happy to do that. And the scary thing about this for most people is like, oh, we gotta deliver to this then, right? Like, we are setting the expectation, so we have to deliver to it. But this is where it's kind of supporting literature around how you structure this stuff can be helpful so that we can send that off to them. There's also ways that tech can make us not be the bad guy. So we did a video with Missive not that long ago. Missive is an example of a tool that handles this stuff really well and you can set up like autoresponders. And so you can literally say like, hey, based on who it is, you know, I'll get back to you within 48 hours or something like that. Any situations where we can use tech to kind of be the bad guy and remind them of that, those boundaries in a more automated way, I think that comes across a little bit better. Yeah. So there's systems to how to optimize this. But yeah, also at the end of the day, it's like we have to kind of have the confidence to stand up for that as well. And there's scummy and non-scummy ways to do that. This is probably a little bit of an easier question on invoicing. What is the minimum amount of information that you need to put on an invoice in order to make it work? Because I put in essentially what was in the proposal just to make sure that those line items continue to be replicated. But is that necessary? That's a great question. Are they on recurring billing through Ignition? Yes, but my subscription, it only shows up the just the one line item of the particular package that they're at. So it's literally just one sentence without any of the clarifying detail behind it on the invoice. I think in most cases we care about that more than they do. But you will occasionally have the client that's like, what does this mean? Show me the detail. Right, right. A balancing act there, honestly, because a lot of this boils down to platform limitations, is in that very concise thing that it will include, they're actually linking out to more information rather than all of the detail being there inside of the invoice. So my take here is that we pay a lot more attention to this than our clients do. And when we think the clients care, it's because one or two outliers complained and like probably nobody else cares. It's really easy to get mired in like the the operational headaches of 3-tier proposals because people do them so many different ways. And a really common question— in fact, let's just tackle this. Thank you for the question. Super common thing. We work with a client and they have 4 different businesses. They have the main business, they have a couple LLCs for, you know, their rentals, and then we have their 1040s. So 4 clients, I guess. And we do tax for them and we do bookkeeping for them. Well, what if they want gold tier for this and bronze tier for that, silver tier for that? Like, we have to simplify so much. Like, we are doing so many different things for different people. I think that you think of it more through the lens of, of the relationship. And for the entirety of the relationship, what level of service are we going to give them? Because they're going to call you and they're going to have 2 questions about the main business, 1 question about the rental, and 1 question about a brokerage statement that just came in late. So my take here is like, we have to reduce. We also can't let the tool lead the process too much, unfortunately. And I would love it if our tools did all this stuff perfectly and the invoice came out just the way that we need it. In my experience, it's very rare that you actually end up with exactly what you need. But all that means is that we need a human and some systems to fill in the gaps. And I like— there's so much shame around manual processes, and I'm guilty of this too. We're like, I will totally geek out on trying to automate a thing and you spend half a day and maybe it works and then it breaks a week later and you're playing software night janitor and like That's— that just sucks. But the reality is when we can't automate that thing, like there is a solution. The solution is still having a system and plugging a person into that. If you're solo, like, sure, there's, there's trade-offs there. Do you really want to do that or not? But the most important thing, like the North Star is not, can I get this invoice synced back correctly to my accounting system? The North Star is, am I getting paid what I should get paid? Like that is the biggest thing to me. The operational side, like we can solve for that. And if it doesn't connect and integrate and automate perfectly, like Yep. We got to have a plan for how to handle that. Lord knows none of our systems seem to talk to each other in the way that we want them to. But like, keep the eyes on like, what is the client's experience when they look at how they work with me? When they look at that proposal, are they seeing a whole bunch of accountant speak or are they seeing actually the words that they use? So when you onboard a client, this is a great use case for AI meeting note takers. If you've got recordings of discovery calls or onboarding meetings, that sort of thing, and the clients are talking about like the problems that they have and why they've, they've come to work with you. The language that they use is completely different than the language that we use. Like we have our own little language, right? And we run off and we stand around the tables and we just, we have our own little, little language that other people don't understand. But who's writing the copy on your website? Like you are, right? Who's writing the proposal? Who's listing the services? We're doing all that, but that's not the same language that our clients These meeting transcripts, like, that actually can be a goldmine to say, how do they describe where they're at? Oh, that's how I should talk about what I'm doing. In my experience, like, you're going to be fist fighting any billing solution, but like my North Star is like, what is the client experience and am I getting out of this project what I should be getting out of it? So we're a bookkeeping CFO firm and charge flat monthly fees. And, you know, we're usually raising the fees every year. At my prior firm, firm that I sold, like, we would, we would email the clients as long as it wasn't like too big of an increase. We would just email them and say, hey, here's your new fee. This is in effect in January. Maybe say why if there was a reason, but not always, and leave it at that versus like actually having a meeting. And it just felt like there's less friction there. If it was going to be a big increase, we would have a meeting to explain it. But like, I guess, what's your take? I mean, it sounds like you like to have the meeting to talk to the client with the renewal. About it? Like, what's your take on that? Friction, less friction? Depends on the dollars we're talking. I will always give them a booking link if they want to discuss the proposal. So at a minimum, they're getting a proposal. We have a sequence of emails before that to say, here's what to look out for, here's how they work, here's how's an example, here's your proposal with a booking link if they want to talk live. If it is a bigger dollar proposal, like not the change necessarily, but if it's just a more substantial one for my business, I will just say, here's a proposal. Let's get on a call when you've had time to review it so that we need to meet. We need to talk about it before they make a decision. Yeah, I would say part of the answer here is like committing to just spending more time on the tactics of those. You could certainly give somebody a flat bump. The reality is they know nothing about what you do and the different ways that you can serve them. It also doesn't let you real scope back in at all, which I know a lot of us need to do. So I see it as there's for sure— and I can relate to this— there's almost a fear of opening up a bigger conversation and you're like, do I want to open that Pandora's box or not? I think most of us right now aren't in a position where we want our business to simply get small inflation bumps until the end of time. I think there's a much larger opportunity available for a more of a different approach to serving these people and better capturing the folks who would happily pay more. I would say, in my opinion, that makes makes the extra effort worth doing. And our firm, like, we were going pretty fast, but our biggest source of new revenue was always renewals and upsells within those renewals. So not all clients are going to be made equal though. And like, you may— you probably don't want to start with 100% of my clients. So one thing Geraldine Carter, who's a coach for firms, she recommends anytime you're doing this, actually starting it in batches. So maybe take 20% of your clients and put these 3 tiers in front of them, because if 15 of them say yes to gold, it means we got to set our price way higher on the next batch. Right? So you're not doing a bunch of volume stuff, like you're not doing volume 1040 or anything like that. That sort of stuff I do in batch. But I would say for the people where you feel like there's a good likelihood, like we're going to prioritize anybody here and not do 100% of them, the folks who are your most happy clients that you want more of, those are the people that I would give the opportunity, put that 3-tier proposal in front of. But then it means we got to make the time for doing this on an annual basis and kind of build that into the annual plan. Yeah, it's just like if they're happy with what's happening and let's say you've already had them select in and they're already at like a silver or maybe even a gold, but now you're doing an annual price increase, like do you want to force them to sit and talk with you about the 10% increase you're gonna put in this year, or do you just say this is gonna happen, let us know if you have any questions? No, I send them the proposal. If they're happy, that's probably the person where there's the most of upside here potentially. If they're happy, I'm putting this proposal in front of them and saying, depending on how big they are, yes, let's have a conversation about this, or let me know if you have any questions. But my take here is, and I know what you mean, like, I don't want to upset the boat, let's just keep it at the same level. But in my experience, those are the people that want more of you. And those bumps, those are not just doing more, those are making the project itself much more profitable. But test it. So take some of those folks, don't do it on all of them, test it. See, like, you know, whatever they're coming in on is bronze. So if it means we got to rethink, like, what is— what does silver and gold look like? Test that out. Because if we're setting that up correctly, saying yes to that is a home run. It's at least twice as profitable, right? For tax work, what are your thoughts on— we have one price for tax returns, and then you have the three-tiered pricing to make it simple for staff admin to be able to quote pricing versus going through the spreadsheet and saying this guy's going to be this much, this guy's going to be this much, this guy's going to be this much? Question of volume. I think for bigger business tax ones, there's a greater argument for spending more time on it. For our 1040s, what we did transitioning out of hourly was we basically created like 6 tranches that 1040s fell into that were just based on the fees they paid last year. And so this was just a broad brushstroke approach because we did 1,600 of them. The first group was like anybody that was below the new minimum, $800. Second group was, you know, $800 to $1,100, something like that, up through $5,000. And then 6 was like jumbo, anything above $3,500 or some, some number. In your market here, those numbers are probably bigger. And that was 5 years ago. So we put them into buckets. It's like 1040 Prep 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and then, and then jumbo. Everybody in those groups got the same size. It made it— I get the same price. It made it easier for staff and all of that when a new client was coming in to say like, let's drop you into this bucket. 'cause they're kind of bigger brackets now. But then each of those, like, you can still extend a 3-tier proposal for them. In our case, we didn't on the 1040 work the first year because that was the biggest, hardest, high-volume change. We did it on the business clients though. And so if you're thinking about triaging, like, where do I start? Like, what's the subset where we'll get the most value from this? Because it may be really hard to do on everything. I probably wouldn't start with 1040. I'd start with the bigger dollar stuff. Hey, if you've got any clients that have to do like ugly project tracking or have any degree of inventory management or big ugly invoices like the type you see from construction companies that are a mile long and have all this item detail, then my brother, this episode's sponsor, MakersHub, it is for you. Even if you don't do the accounting, is a big one to share with your client because truly the area of accounting that has been most turned on its head by AI is accounts payable. And it's not even close. We had some big meaty bill pay engagements we did with clients where I truly could have automated 80% of what we were doing with Maker's Hub. The extraction quality is so far beyond what OCR could ever do, and because it can now pull all like every little fiddly detail from the invoice in a totally automated way— like, like, by the way, we— I think we're actually very close to fully automated extraction, which people have been saying for over a decade. You don't have to review the bills anymore. It's like, really? Because my job is to do the bills, and if there's an extra zero that slips in there, I'm gonna lose my job. Feels like we're actually getting close to fully automated extraction. But because I can pull all those details really well, you can then build all sorts of automated workflows on top of that for like really complex approvals. And we're talking more than just like pull the date and the amount from the invoice. We're talking about every single little fiddly detail in the item, like itemized list. This is crazy. MakerSub, we did some examples on a demo, uh, on YouTube where it was even pulling handwritten text accurately. Crazy stuff. Even if this is not something you're doing for your clients, if you have clients that are doing gnarly billing and inventory management, all this stuff, MakersHub, a lot of people that are raving fans of it because it just takes the level this stuff can be automated like just to another level. How many times did I just say level? Okay, you know what to do next. Learn more down at the link in the show notes. If you got a client you want to share this with, I would say either send them the landing page or send them one of the demos we've done on my YouTube channel. And in like 7 minutes they can get a sense of what it is. That's it. That's the ad read. We got more AI headlines going around than ever before right now, right? Accounting firms are hiring AI agents to do real work, but to do real work. But one company, they said, we know better. They said, we're going to be here for you when you need a human. You know, remember a human, the original AI agent. And Cloud Accounting Staffing, it's run by folks that used to run an accounting firm and help you find accounting talent all over the world. Now they've got a self-service portal where you can actually go out right now and in 60 seconds or less see all of the candidates that they've got who are looking for roles, even book interviews directly from that portal. They even do human benchmarking. They do assessments with these folks so you can see their personality type and like what percentile they come in on certain accounting skills. They've done all this pre-work for you. So for you, it's as easy as hopping into the portal, and booking an interview. These humans come absolutely packed with all sorts of features, all sorts of things your AI agents can't do. Okay, so I know you're hiring a bunch of AI agents right now, but if you need a human— hot, maybe this is a hot take— if you need a human, talk with Cloud Accountant Staffing. To learn more, check out the link down in the show notes. So I have a question in terms of like in our firm, we— I feel like we've missed the boat a little bit on automation or, you know, just being more efficient. I feel like Everybody takes too long to do stuff, don't really use Zapier or Make. Do you feel like the play now is to just go straight into ChatGPT or do you still recommend going to Zapier, going to Make, kind of figuring that out? Like what do you recommend for somebody that maybe is a 15-people firm where I'm happy to lean into tech but not everybody is? Like what's the best path forward? I think it's really easy to compare yourself to other firms and think that you're behind. Like almost everybody in here is feeling behind right now. Like that's totally normal, especially on tech stuff. You consume any sort of thought leadership and you're like, oh geez, I'm not doing a lot of things. Reality is like everybody's got messes. In terms of where to start, I actually think of Zapier and Make doing different jobs than ChatGPT. Those are more like procedural, you know, every time I get a new lead on my website, where do I want that data to go? Every time something changes here, how do I trigger something over there? Those are kind of, it's kind of like nice to have backend things that are sometimes worth building. I don't, I mean my, and this is coming from a nerd that started making content that was like Zapier for accountants. Like, those are my first videos. So I love that stuff and it's super fun. Reality was I was the owner of a 40-person firm and that was not the way I should be spending my time. And then you build all these things and then they break, and then you're playing software night janitor. Like, that's not what most of us need to be doing. There are certainly agencies that can help us with that stuff, even agencies that do like cool RPA stuff in tax software to like automate your tax offer for the first time. So I think oftentimes it's worth pulling in folks like that to help or to look at your systems and say, what would the biggest impact automation opportunity be here? Build it for us and then maintain it for us. So it's not me. ChatGPT, I think that's a whole different ball of wax. I think that is a everyone in the team needs to be building this new skill. ChatGPT in its current form, it is not something that will run and just do things for you in the background yet. I'm sure that's coming someday. But to me, that's like a new skill set that our people need to be building week over week. So I kind of think of them as two different things because it's like that will help you do just about everything day to day, from writing emails to changing Excel files and all that. While the Zapier Make type of stuff is more infrastructure. So there's a question of the plumbing of the firm and how those bigger systems get built and maintained. That's kind of a separate thing in my opinion. We have a bookkeeping firm, so we're not using any tax software. So and we were talking in one of the groups I was in about documents. Documents and renaming documents and actually going in and renaming documents. That's super fun. Yeah. And I was thinking like, what, do you have a recommendation for some specific software that you can just take a document, throw it in, and it renames it automatically that's not a tax software? Yeah. You know, this is one of those things that like ought to be a feature in every tool, I feel like, and hopefully it will soon. I'll be honest, to me, this is, in my opinion, this is something your practice management system ought to solve. Like your practice management system ought to be the home of all of your files or ought to to be deeply connected with the home of all of your files. There's not, to my knowledge, there's not like this intermediary step that will— a tool that will do the renaming. And I wouldn't want there to be, because in order to do the renaming, it has to see all the contents of the file. So like, that's not a job that I really want to pull in this weird third-party tool for if it's, you know, all sorts of bank statements, stuff like that. I would say right now the only platforms that I'm aware of that do that in our space are TaxDome and Canopy. And they have the same for both Microsoft and Google, so it can see into your files, it can see into your emails. My understanding right now is all of that is currently only read-only, probably for good reason. So in the case like this, you couldn't like prompt it to change the file names. There is a whole interesting conversation there of like there's people that think, just think that chat like that will kind of become the interface and become all of our apps. And that feels a little sci-fi for me right now, but it will at least do the reading to retrieve information from it. It could also make the names of files not matter, you know, Chuck them in there, be whatever, it can see the contents and give me the answers. That's, that still feels a little sci-fi too though. Got a quick one here. So we learned a lot about great technology innovators today, and with that comes tech fatigue. How do firm owners balance tech fatigue with maybe fear of missing out of the next game-changing solution for their firm? Subtle, real subtle, Danielle. That's Danielle from Digits. How exhausted your team is is a very real factor in how much we can take on. I mean, I had a 40-person firm and ideas up to here, and I would hire people off social media to come work for me, and they thought they were coming to work for the Starship Enterprise, and I'm like, buddy, this ain't it. Like, this is, this is a big ship that we're steering as best as they can. And they'd come to me and they're like, they're like, I got this really good idea. And I'm like, I love that. Thank you so much. But there's only so many things we can execute on at a time. It is— we definitely have to pay attention to where our team's at and the fatigue and all that. We have to pay really close attention when we're hiring to, to make sure we have people on the team who are like energized by change. If you're the only one on the team that is that way, you know how painful that is. Like, you are the battery for everyone. Everyone just sucks you dry every single day. And in my case, all it actually took were a couple of people who were like, I love this stuff, I can figure this out. And they had that battery too. And that just changed my life. And it makes other people get in line a little bit when they're like, okay, like, this is kind of where we're going. So it's a question first of prioritization. Where am I going to going to get the most ROI? What is the highest priority change? And then it is a question of like, what's the appropriate speed for where we're at right now? Thanks, Jason. This is kind of— what are your thoughts on AI potentially, you know, eliminating these 1040 shops? I mean, AI, I think increasingly is feeling more like sort of a gradual evolution. Like it's definitely faster and there's some really exciting sort of tipping points when it can do this or that. I mean, tax research, a great example that will never be what it was. Us. Like, there's never going to be a day where you're going through those legacy tools trying to find that stuff, like going through 20 pages of things and you find the answer and then 7 pages later you find the exception. We will never go back to doing research that way. And the next step, honestly, is like giving it the tax return and being like, take a look at this, take a look at that. Like, you might be missing things. Like, that's going to continue changing. 1040 for sure. Like, AI certainly, I think, is going to come for the most simple of the work that we're doing. It's gonna make productized solutions come up market. So the TurboTaxes and the Jackson Hewitts and all those things, they'll keep getting better. It doesn't really change the game for us in my opinion. Right now, many of us are, we're kind of deciding what part of the market that we wanna serve. And when you look and you see like TurboTax full-service small business now, which is where you like actually work with an accountant, is now charging $1,600, I think it was, for federal only for small business tax return. I'm pretty sure that's above the national average for what professional, How much do tax professionals charge for an S corp return? $1,750 they're charging. Great, man. Anybody that doesn't want to pay more than $1,750, you send them right there, right? It's going to force us to keep moving up market. And we struggle with our value sometimes and even charging like, I'm not worth that. Like, it's going to force us to keep going up market because these AI solutions will keep getting better. I think it is another argument for serving folks through a more specific lens, a more specific type of entrepreneur, because generalist AI tools, they're really good at all the general stuff, right? Facts there. Like, how does that apply to barbers? How does that apply to beekeepers? Like, what's the specific areas where we can still help people? I also think we are very well suited to ride the wave because our tools, our professional tools, are getting better. Like, they really are. And if you think about how AI is inherently imperfect and how somebody still has to review the output, we kind of already have built our machines to work that way. We have a quality assurance process. You think AI is dumb? We've all worked with interns, man. You're not letting that stuff go out the door. So in many ways, we're kind of designed to be able to handle an imperfect AI well. But the next decade is going to look like, can I trust that AI to do that thing without supervising it? We're actually seeing version 1 of this now in ChatGPT with agent mode. They can go out and use the browser. I could log it into QuickBooks and tell it to go do a job. But am I going to? Do I need to supervise it? Will I let it do it unsupervised? You may have heard me share the story of a tax pro who used ChatGPT agent mode to prepare a return in TurboTax. Tax, and it did it flawlessly, and the output matched his professional tax software. It's already good enough to be pretty useful. But what can we trust it to do and not trust it to do? That's going to be the next 5 or 10 years of like, AI is this good, but can I trust it? And it won't be good enough until the day that it is. And so it's the really messy— how do the humans kind of work around that and support it— that we're kind of going to be navigating. So my take here is like, what's going to happen is going to happen. I don't have control over that. What I do have control over is like, how do I plug into this stuff and keep helping people? Because if I'm in the business of bookkeeping and classifying transactions, yep, maybe I'm at risk. If I'm in the business of helping entrepreneurs overcome whatever accounting and compliance-related issues stand in the way of entrepreneurship, that's not going anywhere, right? Like, there's no timeline where there's not still blockers to entrepreneurship. That's the problem that we solve in my mind. Two questions. I'm going to cheat. What's your and? And also, also, we all in here have things that we're working on and changing. I want you to yell at us a little bit and give us a little more encouragement. We need some harsh encouragement. Don't go easy. I've— this is a hard one for me, man. I've talked with John about it, did a whole podcast interview. Still don't know that I stuck the landing on what my and is. I am definitely one of the— I'm one of those people who you're like, you raise your hand, you're like, I don't know, man, because because I work a lot. I blame my kids too. I'm like, "I shouldn't have an 'and' right now, 'cause I want to spend every moment with my kids." And everybody's like, "Aww." But then I talk to Jon, and I'm like, "I'm not a complete person." I was a big-time car nerd growing up. My dad, like, raced motorcycles, like, dirt bikes and stuff like that. And in my childhood, I had virtually no time experiences connecting with my father, and that was kind of the one thing that we had was, like, a shared interest in car stuff. Stuff. And when I graduated from college, he got me a— is anybody familiar with rally racing? It's like off-road car racing. He got me a gift certificate for this rally school, and it's a thing that we did together, and it's like one of my favorite memories. And I absolutely loved it. Like, it was just the most fun I ever had doing anything. I didn't know the first thing about cars or working on cars. It was just a blast. And the next 6 years of my life were consumed by that, and I raced rally cars all over North America, and it was, it was this really cool, fun journey. Then work got real important, and I didn't do any version of that. And now that I have kids, I got a 6-year-old— I've got an 8-year-old daughter, I've got a 6-year-old boy, and a 4-year-old boy, and they're so into like anything with a steering wheel. And I'm like, man, I gotta get my life figured out. And there's like that with now where we live, there's this like indoor sort of go-kart sort of thing. And I'm like, man, when I was their age, this would have been absolute heaven for me. And so I think it's probably some version of that. The hard thing with car stuff is like takes a lot of time, it's expensive and all that stuff. But I also have an added motivation now of being able to share this. Like when John talks about you going to a Notre Dame game and, and it's sharing that with the family, like I have this added motivator that maybe gets me over the hump of like I could share this with my, with my boys now and my daughter, and that's a cool thing for them too. That's probably the most of an and that I have. This is what the answer I gave John when we last talked. I'm— I love strength training, but I don't talk about it because I tell people that and And I go, huh? So you're like just getting into this or just strength training 6 days a week for like 60 to 90 minutes? And I just love it. It's the best thing for my brain. And I've got like this whole home gym that I just— it's my happy place. I mean, everybody in Oregon, when they have a home gym, it's in their garage. And I moved to New York, and it's so cold in New York, and you go out there in the morning and everything metal is just frozen. And I'm like, this sucks, man. And I— we had just moved out there, and I go to the barber, and I'm like, here's the problem, like, it's tough for me right now. And he's like, you're an idiot. Like, nobody does that here. Of course, if you put it in your garage, it is going to be cold. So I'm still figuring all of that out. I've never worked out in so many clothes in my life. Those are the closest things I have to ants. In terms of motivating you more, I think John put it well when it's like, man, you got like one life to live. And having kids has made it feel to me like time is passing so much faster because I can see it in them and how much they change. And then me and my wife are like, dang, we're getting old too, man. Like, it's happening. We have so many of these issues where it's like, you know, we won't talk about what we do and we won't be self-promotional and all these things. And it's like, if you're going to to be put on this earth and spend most of your waking hours, unfortunately, doing your work. We got to take that so seriously in terms of like, if we're not going to talk about what we do, you know, like we got to get over whatever that virtue signaling is or something that makes it hard for us to talk about. And I'm— you heard me stammering on about realize, like, this is a hard thing for me too. If you're not going to do it though, who will? But also the hard changes, like the big evolutions in the business that are very hard to commit to, in my mind, those are the things standing between us and having a life. Doing the car thing with my boys and all of that. And it's just— I was chatting with a lady a couple of weeks ago and they're in a small town. There used to be like 6 firms and it's consolidated down to like 2. And they have all this work coming their way and they're like, man, we're saying yes to it, but it's a lot right now. Guy across the street from them runs a tax firm, 42 years old, drops dead middle of March. No plan, has like 10 employees, 42 years old. We say these things and other people outside is like, y'all are crazy. Like, that is a level of, like, sacrifice that is just so off the charts. And we, like, we can really, really geek on this stuff, right? Like, goodness sakes, how many podcast episodes have you listened to? How many times have you subjected your spouse or your kids or something like that? They were like, you're listening to that guy again? Come on, man. I meet a lot of those, like, angry spouses at these events, which is great. It matters. But also, like, let's do the version of this that doesn't stand in the way of, like, being more interesting than being just this. This is a chance for us to get those wiggles out and have all those conversations. But we can't be so hung up on pleasing all of the people who are our clients, you know, never lets us get off the hook, never lets us get to a point where we're actually running a business that we're proud of. Gang, it means the world to me that you're here. And thank you so much for coming today. Mm.